Home»(Sacred) Mountains and Sites in China 中国名山宫观»Tongboshan 桐柏山

Images of the Daoist mountain Tongbo in Zhejiang province, with the Daoist cloister 桐柏宫 sitting on top. There was another, larger Daoist monastery below the mountain (called Tongboguan 桐柏观), which was submerged by a reservoir constructed here in 1958. Some of the artefacts (among them a stone sculpture from the Han dynasty and steles dating to the Tang, Song and Ming dynasties) from this monastery were rescued and transported to the cloister, but fell victim to the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. The Daoist nun in image 6 was the last of the Longmen lineage here at Tongbo (26. generation). Maybe there are new (i.e younger) "followers of the Dao" taking care of the place now.

Visited November 23-24, 1985. Images taken with a Minolta SLR. Scanned on Epson 2400, some post-processing (mainly salvaging some of the original image quality) and file type conversion from TIFF to lossless JPG. Uploaded December 19, 2006.

Thomas H. Hahn
Ithaca, NY